I understand your perspective completely, and I agree with you on the central point of Kickstarter needing to figure out how to look after the backer. When you

I understand your perspective completely, and I agree with you on the central point of Kickstarter needing to figure out how to look after the backer. When you have companies effectively using Kickstarter as a pre-ordering and marketing system rather than a means of raising capital without going to investors, there's a problem. What I'm becoming more and more concerned about, however, is products which are clearly unviable, or just plain silly. There seems to be a surge in people saying 'A computer the size of a pack of cards? I can make that!' (to use a random example rather than picking on any particular product) and then collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a low quality Raspberry Pi clone. Or even worse, nothing at all, and going bankrupt before they get the chance to refund backers (as if that was ever in their plan). Jamey definitely didn't need to raise 1.8 million to get his game into production, (he asked for $33k I think). I imagine that the success was a bit of a shock, and he's considering pulling out of using Kickstarter in the future in favour of a more traditional pre-order route (he's written a fair amount about it on his blog http://stonemaiergames.com/e-newsletter/blog/ http://stonemaiergames.com/e-newsletter/blog/, which is a very interesting read whether you like Kickstarter, the business of board games or neither).